What if we someday learn how to model small brain units,
and so can "upload" ourselves into new computer brains? What if
this happens before we learn how to make human-level artificial
intelligences? The result could be a sharp transition to an
upload-dominated world, with many dramatic consequences. In particular,
fast and cheap replication may once again make Darwinian evolution of
human values a powerful force in human history. With evolved values, most
uploads would value life even when life is hard or short, uploads would
reproduce quickly, and wages would fall. But total wealth should rise, so
we could all do better by accepting uploads, or at worse taxing them,
rather than trying to delay or segregate them.

Introduction

The future is hard to predict. We may feel confident that
eventually space will be colonized, or that eventually we'll make stuff by
putting each atom just where we want it. But so many other changes may
happen before and during those changes that it is hard to say with much
confidence how space travel or nanotechnology may affect the ordinary
person. Our vision seems to fade into a fog of possibilities.

The scenario I am about to describe excites me because it seems an
exception to this general rule -- more like a crack of dawn than a fog,
like a sharp transition with sharp implications regardless of the night
that went before. Or like a sight on the horizon much clearer than the
terrain inbetween. And, as scenarios go, this one seems rather likely.
Here it is.

If A.I. Is Hard

The human brain is one of the most complex systems we
know, and so progress in understanding the brain may be slow, relative to
other forms of technological and scientific progress. What if artificial
intelligence (A.I.), the problem of designing intelligent systems from
scratch, turns out to be similarly hard, one of the hardest design tasks
we confront? {This is my impression from 9 years of A.I. research, though
of course many A.I. researchers disagree.}

If so, it may well be that technological progress and economic growth give
us computers with roughly the computational power of the human brain well
before we know how to directly program such computers with
human-equivalent intelligence. After all, we make progress in software as
well as hardware; we could now make much better use of a thirty year old
computer than folks could the day it was built, and similar progress
should continue after we get human-equivalent hardware. We don't know just
how good human brain software is, but it might well be beyond our
abilities when we have good enough hardware. {We might well have good
enough hardware now for a slow A.I. that doesn't deal much with the
physical world -- say an A.I. contract lawyer.}

Not having human-level A.I. would not mean computers and robots couldn't
do better than us on many specific tasks, or that computer-aided humans
wouldn't be many times more productive than unaided humans. We might even
realize extreme "cyborg" visions, with biological brains and
bodies wrapped in lots of artificial extras -- imagine heavy use of
computer agents, visual pre-processors, local information banks, etc.

But not having human-level A.I. could mean that human intelligence
continues to be very productive - that on average the amount of valued
stuff that can be produced decreases by a substantial fraction when the
amount of human labor used to produce that stuff decreases by a
substantial fraction. Cyborg add-ons, without that brain inside, couldn't
do nearly as much.

Thus, as today, and as standard economic models {Consider a model where
utility is roughly a product of powers of leisure and consumption, and
amount produced is roughly a product of powers of labor and other capital.
Such a model can explain why leisure time has not changed much as per
capita wealth has increased dramatically over the last few centuries, can
explain high leisure among slave owners, and explains why leisure is
higher in places and times with high income taxes. One can explain
seasonal high leisure among foraging tribes as due to seasonal limits on
foraging productivity.} predict, most folks would still spend much,
perhaps most, of their time working. And most wealth would remain in the
form of people's abilities to work, even if the median worker is
incredibly wealthy by today's standards. We are, after all, incredibly
wealthy by the standards of the ancients, yet we still work. In contrast,
having loyal human-level A.I.s could be more like owning a hundred human
slaves, each as skilled as yourself -- in this case there is hardly any
point in working, unless for the pleasure of it.

A limited understanding of the brain and biology in general would also
suggest that humans would not be highly modified - that whatever we would
have added on the outside, inside we would be basically the same sort of
people with the same sort of motivations and cognitive abilities. And we
would be likely still mortal as well. After all, even biology has evolved
the brain largely by leaving old complex systems alone; new functionality
is mainly added by wrapping old systems in new add-on modules.

Uploads

Imagine that before we figure out how to write human-level
software, but after we have human-level hardware, our understanding of the
brain progresses to the point where we have a reasonable model of local
brain processes. That is, while still ignorant about larger brain
organization, we learn to identify small brain units (such as synapses,
brain cells, or clusters of cells) with limited interaction modes and
internal states, and have a "good enough" model of how the state
of each unit changes as a function of its interactions. The finiteness and
locality of ordinary physics and biochemistry, and the stability of brain
states against small perturbations, should ensure that such a model
exists, though it may be hard to find. {Roger Penrose, in The Emporer's
New Mind, suggests that non-local corrections to quantum gravity may play
an important role in the brain; I find this extremely unlikely.}

Imagine further that we learn how to take apart a real brain and to build
a total model of that brain -- by identifying each unit, its internal
state, and the connections between units. {See [Merkle] for an exploration
of the near-term feasibility of this, and [Platt] for a fictional
account.} A "good enough" model for each unit should induce in
the total brain model the same general high-level external behavior as in
the real brain, even if it doesn't reproduce every detail. That is, if we
implement this model in some computer, that computer will "act"
just like the original brain, responding to given brain inputs with the
same sort of outputs.

That model would be what we call an "upload" -- software with
human-level intelligence, yet created using little understanding of how
the brain works, on anything but the lowest levels of organization. In
software terminology, this is like "porting" software to a new
language or platform, rather than rewriting a new version from scratch
(more the A.I. approach). One can port software without understanding it,
if one understands the language it was written in.

Of course some will doubt that such a brain model would "feel"
the same on the inside, or even feel anything at all. But it must act just
as if it feels, since it must act like the original brain, and so many
people will believe that it does so feel.

Now without some sort of connection to the world, such an upload would
likely go crazy or attempt suicide, as would most proto-uploads, not-quite
good-enough brain-models that fail on important details like hormonal
regulation of emotions. But with even very crude fingers and eyes or ears,
uploads might not only find life worth living but become productive
workers in trades where crude interaction can be good enough, such as
writing novels, doing math, etc. And with more advanced android bodies or
virtual reality, uploads might eventually become productive in most
trades, and miss their original bodies much less.

Thus some people should be willing to become uploads, even if their old
brains were destroyed in the process. And since, without A.I., uploads
should be productive workers, there should be big money to be made in
funding the creation of such uploads. The day such money starts to flow,
uploads should begin to be created in significant quantity. This day would
be the "dawn" I referred to above, a sharp transition with clear
and dramatic consequences.

Upload Consequences

The consequences for the uploads themselves are the most
immediate. They would live in synthetic bodies and brains, which could
vary much more from each other than ordinary bodies and brains. Upload
brain models could be run at speeds many times that of ordinary human
brains, and speed variations could induce great variations in upload's
subjective ages and experience. And upload bodies could also vary in size,
reliability, energy drain, maintenance costs, extra body features, etc.
Strong social hierarchies might develop; some might even be
"gods" in comparison to others.

To a fast (meaning accelerated) upload, the world would seem more
sluggish. Computers would seem slower, and so fast uploads would find less
value in them; computers would be used less, though still much used.
Communication delays would make the Earth feel bigger, and space
colonization would seem a slower and more forbidding prospect (all else
equal). Interest rates would seem smaller, making investing in the future
less attractive for a given set of values.

Fast uploads who want physical bodies that can keep up with their faster
brains might use proportionally smaller bodies. For example, assume it
takes 10^15 instructions per second and 10^15 fast memory bits to run a
brain model at familiar speeds, and that upload brains could be built
using nanomechanical computers and memory registers, as described in [Drexler].
If so, an approx. 7 mm. tall human-shaped body could have a brain that
that fits in its brain cavity, keeps up with its approx. 260 times faster
body motions, and consumes approx. 16 W of power. Such uploads would glow
like Tinkerbell in air, or might live underwater to keep cool. Bigger
slower bodies could run much cooler by using reversible computers
[Hanson].

Billions of such uploads could live and work in a single high-rise
building, with roomy accommodations for all, if enough power and cooling
were available. To avoid alienation, many uploads might find comfort by
living among tiny familiar-looking trees, houses, etc., and living under
an artificial sun that rises and sets approx. 260 times a day. Other
uploads may reject the familiar and aggressively explore the new
possibilities. For such tiny uploads, gravity would seem much weaker,
higher sound pitches would be needed, and visual resolution of ordinary
light might decline (in both angular and intensity terms).

Alternatively, uploads seeking familiarity might withdraw more into
virtual realities, if such simulations were not overly expensive. For
relaxing and having fun, virtual realities could be anything uploads
wanted them to be. But for getting real work done, "virtual"
realities could not be arbitrary; they would have to reflect the
underlying realities of the physical, software, knowledge, or social
worlds they represent. Since, compared with software we write, the human
brain seems especially good at dealing with the physical world, and since
dealing with physical objects and processes should remain a big part of
useful work for a long time to come, many uploads should remain familiar
with the physical world for a long time to come.

An intermediate approach between tiny bodies and virtual reality would be
to separate brains from bodies. Brains might be relatively fixed in
location, and use high-bandwidth connections to "tele-operate"
remote bodies. Of course such separation would not be economical at
distances where communications costs were too high relative to brain
hardware costs.

Uploads might need to find better ways to trust each other. While ordinary
humans can often find unconscious signs of deception in facial
expressions, upload faces may be under more direct conscious control. And
uploads minds could be tortured without leaving any direct physical
evidence of the event.

If, as seems reasonable, upload brains are given extra wiring to allow the
current brain state to be cheaply "read out" and "written
in", then uploads could change bodies or brains relatively often, and
could be transported long distances by ordinary communication lines.
"Backups" could be saved, allowing near immortality for those
who could afford it; if your current brain and body is unexpectedly
destroyed, your latest backup can be installed in a new brain and body.

The most dramatic consequences for both uploads and everyone one else
come, I think, from the fact that uploads can be copied as well as
backed-up. The state of one upload brain might be read out and written
into a new upload brain, while that state still remained in the original
brain. At the moment of creation, there would be two identical upload
minds, minds which would then diverge with their differing experiences.

Uploads who copy themselves at many different times would produce a zoo of
entities of varying degrees of similarity to each other. Richer concepts
of identity would be needed to deal with this zoo, and social custom and
law would face many new questions, ranging from "Which copies do I
send Christmas cards to?" to "Which copies should be punished
for the crimes of any one of them?". {A viable, though perhaps not
optimal, alternative is to hold all copies responsible for the actions of
any one of them. If punishment is by fine when possible, then copy
families could use insurance to contract away this interdependence.}

New forms of social organization might be useful for families of copies of
the same original mind; some families of copies might be very loyal, while
others might fight constantly. Teams of people who work well together
might even be copied together, creating "team families".
Political institutions like "one man, one vote" might require
substantial modification, though large copy families could find obvious
candidates to represent them in legislatures.

A Population Explosion?

Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of upload copying is
the potential for an huge population explosion. If copying is fast, cheap,
and painless, and if enough uploads desire to, can afford to, and are
allowed to make such copies, the upload population could grow at a rate
far exceeding the rate at which their total wealth grows, triggering a
rapid reduction in per-capita (meaning per-copy) wealth.

Would an upload population explode? For a little perspective, let's review
ordinary human population growth. In the short term one might take
people's values {By "values", I mean all preferences, desires,
moral convictions, etc.} as given. In that case reproduction rates depend
on values and per-capita wealth, and per-capita wealth depends on values
and reproduction rates.

People choose to have more or fewer babies depending on their values and
culture, how much such babies will cost them, the wealth they have to
give, how much payback they expect to get from their children later, and
on how their children's lifestyle will depend on family size. Technology
and wealth also influence contraception and the number of babies who
survive to adulthood.

Changes in per capita wealth, on the other hand, depend not only on
reproduction rates, but also on how much folks value current consumption
over future consumption, and on the rates of growth possible in physical,
human, and knowledge capital. And knowledge capital growth rates seem to
grow with the size of the human population [Simon].

The net result of all these factors is not clear from theory, but since we
have observed rising per-capita wealth for the last few centuries, we
might suppose the net tradeoff, given current values, favors rising
per-capita wealth.

A few centuries is only about a dozen generations, however. And Darwinian
arguments suggest that if values can be inherited, then after enough
generations the values in a species should evolve to favor the maximum
sustainable population for any given technology, and the maximum
sustainable growth rate as technology improves [Hansson & Stuart].

This Darwinian view holds that our familiar human values, for resources,
health, comfort, leisure, adventure, friendship, etc., were well suited
for promoting maximal population and growth in the sort of environments
our ancestors faced long ago. And this view suggests that any current
conflict between values and maximal growth, such as that suggested by
declining populations in Europe, is a temporary aberration due to
"recent" rapid changes in the human environment.

Thus, given enough generations, human values should evolve to promote
maximal growth in our new sorts of environments -- one may still worry,
for example, that small minorities who value exceptionally large families
{The Hutterites, a U.S. religion group, has averaged 9 kids per family for
a century} will eventually come to dominate the population.

Of course a complete story of how human values evolve must include the
evolution of idea and value elements as "memes", entities in
their own right and not just as properties passed from human parent to
child through a combination of genetic and cultural evolution. But if our
receptivity to accepting non-parental values can be genetically or
culturally modulated, it is hard to see how human values could
consistently resist human Darwinian pressures over the long term, even
with memetic evolution. Overall, these Darwinian arguments suggesting
maximal growth seem roughly right.

Fortunately, however, this Darwinian process seems slow, and if economic
growth rates continue their historical acceleration, they should soon
exceed the maximum rates at which ordinary humans can have babies. From
then on, per-capita wealth would have to increase, at least until
artificial wombs were created, or until raw materials or knowledge
progress started to "run out", and could no longer expand
exponentially with the population as they have so far. For now though, the
world seems to be changing too fast for Darwinian evolution to catch up.

How do uploads change all this? An upload considering making a copy is
much like a parent considering making a child. An upload would consider
the cost to create a copy, the lifestyle that copy could afford, and how
much they would value having another entity like themselves. Uploads may
value having copies of themselves more or less than ordinary folks now
value having children somewhat like them - this is hard to predict.

But what is clearer is that upload reproduction rates can be very fast --
the upload population could grow as fast as factories could generate new
upload brains and bodies, if funds could be found to pay these factories.
Upload copies, after all, do not need to be raised to adulthood and then
trained in some profession; they are immediately ready to become
productive members of society. Thus the main limitations on reproduction,
and hence on Darwinian evolution of values, would become economic and
political. Who would want to pay how much to make upload copies? And who
would try how hard to stop them?

Upload Economics

To separate some issues, let us first imagine an upload, a
contract lawyer by trade, who is neutral on the subject of whether she
would like more entities like herself around, but who is considering an
offer from someone else to pay for the creation of a copy. For simplicity,
imagine that the original would keep all unique possessions and exclusive
associations, such a painting, spouse, or job, and that the copy will have
to start from scratch.

Such an upload might plausibly agree to this copy if she decided such a
copy would consider their life "worth living", better to have
existed than not. And since this copy could earn wages as a contract
lawyer, she might consider life worth living if those wages, plus interest
on some initial wealth endowment, were enough to cover some minimum
standard of living.

Note, however, that if an upload expects wages to be high enough above
their minimum required income, they might agree to a copy even with a
*negative* initial endowment. That is, if a copy were to be loaned enough
money to buy their new brain and body, that copy might still find life
worth living even under the burden of paying back this loan. {Such a loan
might come from the original upload or any other source, and might involve
more risk-sharing than a simple loan -- more like a joint investment.}

If we now add in the original upload's values for having copies around,
presumably positive for having more company but negative for the added
wage competition, we should find that such an upload has some minimum
expected income at which she would be willing to spin off copies. And
given that this upload has decided to make a copy, she may or may not
prefer to transfer some of the original's wealth to that copy.

Of course some uploads, perhaps even most, might not accept this line of
reasoning. But those that do would, if not forcibly prevented, keep making
copies until their minimum income threshold is reached. Thus if there are
even a few such uploads {Meaning enough so that they can't effectively
conspire to keep their wages high.}, wages for contract lawyers should
quickly fall to near the lowest wage any one such upload contract lawyer
is willing to work for. At this point many previous contract lawyers would
find themselves displaced, even though the total number of contract
lawyers has risen. And a large fraction of all contract lawyers should be
copies of that one upload!

Of course abilities vary, and the lack of an ordinary body could be a
disadvantage for early uploads competing with ordinary workers { Thus
janitorial jobs should be safer longer than programmer jobs.}, limiting
the number of ordinary workers uploads could initially displace. And
reduced diversity of thought among a large family of copies may put them
at a disadvantage in trades which place a premium on creativity. But in
many trades, like contract law, a large number of standardized workers
might have special advantages, especially in reputation-building.

It also takes time for a labor market to absorb new workers; each job is
somewhat different, and it takes time for people to learn each new job.
Uploads running faster than ordinary humans might quickly master the
relevant book-learning, but for most jobs most learning comes from
watching and working with co-workers. At first, most co-workers will not
be uploads, and most physical processes being managed would be tuned for
ordinary human speeds, so being very much faster than usual may not be
worth the cost of the faster hardware.

But as uploads became a larger part of the economy, upload communities
which standardize on faster speeds would become more economical. If the
rate at which faster uploads can grow wealth increases to match their
faster speeds, then market interest rates should grow with the speed of
such uploads. Slower individuals would then be much more tempted to save
instead of consuming their wealth.

Falling wages should mean that, on the margin, labor is substituted for
other forms of capital. So lower wage uploads should use fewer computer
and other productivity aids, and hence seem less "cyborgish".

What about professions where no upload has prior training? Even if the
cost to upload people were very high, or the number of volunteers very
low, upload workers should still displace other workers, though at a
slower rate. If the wage in some trade were above an upload's minimum,
even considering the costs of learning that trade, and if loans could be
arranged, copies would be created intending to master that trade.

The economics of training uploads could be much like the current economics
of software. For example, labor "products" might be sold at
substantially above marginal cost in order to recoup a large initial
training cost. To control prices, some families might want to formally
centralize their decisions about how many copies they make, so that each
copy is no longer free to make more copies. In other families, informal
mechanisms might be sufficient.

As with other software, uploads might reach capacity limits; after a few
hundred or thousand years of subjective experience, uploads might go crazy
in some now unknown way, or simply be less and less able to learn new
skills and information. If this happens, then investments in training
might be limited to backups made and saved when uploads are below some
critical subjective age.

Also as with software now, illicit copying of uploads might be a big
problem. An upload who loses even one copy to pirates might end up with
millions of illicit copies tortured into working as slaves in various
hidden corners. To prevent such a fate, uploads may be somewhat paranoid
about security. They may prefer the added security of physical bodies,
with "skulls" rigged to self-destruct on penetration or command.
And without strong cryptography, they may be wary of traveling by just
sending bits.

The Evolution of Values

The analysis above suggests that, at least at first, the
upload population should expand as fast as people can arrange loans, build
brains and bodies, learn new jobs and professions, and as fast as the
economy can absorb these new workers. Per-capita wages seem likely to fall
in this period, for ordinary humans as well as uploads, though total
wealth should rise.

This population explosion should continue until it reaches limits, such as
those of values or of subsistence. Values limits would be reached if
almost no capable, versatile upload found copies worth making at the
prevailing low wages. Subsistence limits would be reached if uploads
simply couldn't make ends meet on a lower income; lowering their standard
of living any more would lower their productivity, and hence wages, by so
much that they could not afford even that lower standard.

Would values limit this explosion? Yes, of course, if typical values were
held constant; few people now who would make productive uploads would be
willing to work at subsistence levels. It seems, however, that values will
not be held constant. With upload copying, the potential rate and
selectivity of reproduction could once again be comparable to the rate at
which the world changes; Darwinian evolution (this time asexual) would
have caught up with a changing world, and be once again a powerful force
in human history. And since the transmission of values from
"parent" to "child" is so much more reliable with
upload copying, the direct evolution of "memes" should have even
less room to modify our basic Darwinian story.

As wages dropped, upload population growth would be highly selective,
selecting capable people willing to work for low wages, who value life
even when life is hard. Soon the dominant upload values would be those of
the few initial uploads with the most extreme values, willing to work for
the lowest wages {These wages are per product produced, not per time
spent.}. From this point on, value evolution would be limited by the rate
at which people's values could drift with age, or could adjust to extreme
circumstances.

Investors with foresight should be able to make this evolution of upload
values even faster than ordinary "blind" biological evolution.
Investors seeking upload candidates, or upload copies, to whom to loan
money, would likely seek out the few capable people with the most extreme
and pliable values. After all, these candidates would, all else equal,
have the best chances of repaying their loans.

Values might evolve even faster by combining crude modification
techniques, like the equivalent of neuroactive drugs or even torture, with
the ability to rerun experiments from identical starting points. Of course
I do not advocate such experiments, but if they were effective, someone
somewhere would likely use them. Fortunately, I suspect ordinary human
values are varied and flexible enough to accommodate demand without
resorting to such techniques. For example, identical twins who live
together are much more different from each other than those reared apart.
Similarly, an upload in a million-copy family should try all the harder to
be different somehow, including in their values. Thus, given all these
factors, the evolution of upload values might be very fast indeed.

What would values evolve to? Would wages hit subsistence level limits? I
expect that over many generations (i.e., times copied) Darwinian selection
should favor maximum long-term generation of "wealth" that can
be used to buy new copies. That is, since upload reproduction can be so
directly bought, we expect evolution to favor uploads whose values induce
them to take actions which give their copy lineage the maximum long-term
financial return on their investments, including their investments in new
copies, new skills, or in "leisure."

Uploads who are overly shy about copying would lose out, holding less of
the total wealth (as a group), measured by market value of assets, and
constituting less of the population. Similarly, uploads who go wild in
copying, just because they like the idea of having lots of copies, would
become more numerous in the short term but lose out in the long term, both
in total wealth and population. Thus we don't expect uploads to become as
poor as possible, though we do expect them to eliminate consumption of
"frills" which don't proportionally contribute to maximum long
term productivity.

We should also expect an evolution of values regarding death and risk. {It
seems that evolution should favor values that are roughly risk-neutral
over the long term, with utility linear up to near the point of total
world wealth. This seems to imply values roughly logarithmic in returns to
short independent periods.}. Imagine situations in which making a copy
might pay off big, but most likely the copy would fail, run out of money
and have to be "evicted" from its brain and body. Many people
might decline such opportunities, because they so dislike the prospect of
such "death". Others might consider this not much bigger a deal
than forgetting what happened at a party because they were too drunk;
"they" would only lose their experiences since the last copy
event. I expect evolution to prefer the later set of values over the
former.

Perhaps the hardest values to change in uploads will be our
deeply-ingrained values for having children. Early upload technology would
likely not be able to create a baby's brain from scratch, or even to
upload a child's brain and then correctly model brain development
processes. And even when such technology is available, children would
likely be a poor investment, from a long-term growth point of view. New
children may offer new perspectives, but with enough adult uploads, these
benefits should only rarely exceed their high costs. Adults can offer new
perspectives as well, and can do so cheaply.

Eventually, human-level artificial intelligence may be achieved at
competitive hardware costs, or we may learn enough about the high-level
organization of our brains to modify them substantially, perhaps merging
distinct copies or splitting off "partials" of minds. The upload
era would have ended, and many of the consequences of uploads described
above may no longer apply; it seems particularly hard to project beyond
this point.

But before then the upload era may last a long time, at least subjectively
to uploads running at the dominant upload speed. If many uploads are fast,
history will be told from the fast uploads' point of view; history
cronicles wars and revolutions, triumphs and disasters, innovations and
discoveries, and cares little about how many times the earth spins.

Upload Politics

If voters and politicians lose their composure at the mere
prospect of genetic modification of humans, or of wage competition by
foreign workers, imagine the potential reaction against strong wage
competition by "machine-people" with strange values. Uploading
might be forbidden, or upload copying might be highly restricted or
forbidden. Of course without world government or strong multi-lateral
agreements, uploads would eventually be developed in some country, and the
transition would just have been delayed. And even with world government,
covert uploading and copying might happen, perhaps using cryptography to
hide.

If level heads can be found, however, they should be told that if
uploading and copying are allowed, it is possible to make almost everyone
better off. While an upload transition might reduce the market value of
ordinary people's human capital, their training and ability to earn wages,
it should increase total wealth, the total market value of all capital,
including human capital of uploads and others, real estate, company stock,
etc. Thus it can potentially make each person better off.

For example, if most non-uploads had about the same fraction of their
wealth in each form of capital, including owning shares in firms that make
loans to uploads, and if a large enough fraction of upload wages went to
pay off such loans, then most non-uploads would get richer from the
transition. Even if you weren't one of the highly-copied uploads, your
reduced wage-earning ability would be more than compensated for by your
increased income from other sources. You could stop working, yet get
richer and richer. By uploading and resisting copying, you could become
effectively immortal.

The per-capita wealth of highly-copied uploads might decline, but that
would not be a bad thing from their point of view. Their choice would
indicate that they prefer many poorer copies to a single richer copy, just
as parents today prefer the expense of children to the rich life of
leisure possible without them.

Could a big fraction of upload wages go to paying loans? Yes, if there is
enough competition between uploads, and if investors are not overly
restricted by law. For example, refusing to loan to an upload if any other
copy in their family has purposely defaulted on a loan might discourage
such behavior. Alternatively, loans might be made to a copy family as a
whole. But these options would have to be allowed by law.

Could most non-uploads sufficiently diversify their assets? Yes, if we
develop financial institutions which allow this, such as allowing people
to trade fractions of their future wages for shares in mutual funds. But
tax laws like those that now encourage highly undiversified real estate
holdings could cause problems. And even if people are able to so diversify
their assets, they may not choose to do so, yet later demand that
politicians fix their mistake.

If forced to act by their constituents, politicians would do better to tax
uploads and copies, rather than forbidding them, and give the proceeds to
those who would otherwise lose out. {Note that such a tax would be a tax
on the poor, paid to the relatively rich, if one counted per upload copy.}
Total wealth would grow more slowly than it otherwise would, but grow
faster than without uploads. Of course there remains the problem of
identifying the losers; politicals systems have often failed to find such
win-win deals in the past, and could well fail again.

What about those who have values and abilities compatible with becoming
part of the few highly-copied uploads? Would there be great inequality
here, with some lucky few beating out the just-as-qualified rest?

If the cost to create an upload brain model from an ordinary brain were
very high relative to the cost of creating a copy of an upload, or if
computer hardware were so cheap that even the earliest uploads were run
very fast, the first few uploads might have a strong advantage over
late-comers; early uploads may have lots more experience, lower costs, and
may be a proven commodity relative to new uploads. {Many initial uploads
might well be cryonics patients, if legal permission to dissect and
experiment with their brains were easier to obtain.} Billions of copies of
the first few dozen uploads might then fill almost all the labor niches.

Computer technology should keep improving even if work on uploading is
delayed by politics, lowering the cost of copying and the cost to run
fast. Thus the early-adopter advantage would increase the longer uploading
is delayed; delaying uploading should induce more, not less, inequality.
So, if anything, one might prefer to speed up progress on uploading
technology, to help make an uploading transition more equitable.

Similar arguments suggest that a delayed transition might be more sudden,
since supporting technologies should be more mature. Sudden transitions
should risk inducing more military and other social instabilities. All of
these points argue against trying to delay an upload transition. {Note
that, in contrast, a delayed nanotechnology assembler transition seems
likely to be less sudden, since pre-transition manufacturing abilities
would not be as far behind the new nanotech abilities. Efforts to
"design-ahead" nanotech devices, however, might make for a more
sudden transition.}

Contrary to some fears, however, there seem to be no clear military
implications from an upload transition, beyond the issue of transition
speed and general risks from change. Yes, recently backed-up upload
soldiers needn't fear death, and their commanders need only fear the loss
of their bodies and brains, not of their experience and skills. But this
is really just the standard upload trend toward cheaper labor translated
into the military domain. It says little about fundamental military issues
such as the relative expense of offense vs. defense, or feasible military
buildup speeds vs. economic growth rates.

What if uploads decide to take over by force, refusing to pay back their
loans and grabbing other forms of capital? Well for comparison, consider
the question: What if our children take over, refusing to pay back their
student loans or to pay for Social Security? Or consider: What if short
people revolt tonight, and kill all the tall people?

In general, most societies have many potential subgroups who could
plausibly take over by force, if they could coordinate among themselves.
But such revolt is rare in practice; short people know that if they kill
all the tall folks tonight, all the blond people might go next week, and
who knows where it would all end? And short people are highly integrated
into society; some of their best friends are tall people.

In contrast, violence is more common between geographic and culturally
separated subgroups. Neighboring nations have gone to war, ethnic
minorities have revolted against governments run by other ethnicities, and
slaves and other sharply segregated economic classes have rebelled.

Thus the best way to keep the peace with uploads would be to allow them as
full as possible integration in with the rest of society. Let them live
and work with ordinary people, and let them loan and sell to each other
through the same institutions they use to deal with ordinary humans.
Banning uploads into space, the seas, or the attic so as not to shock
other folks might be ill-advised. Imposing especially heavy upload taxes,
or treating uploads as property, as just software someone owns or as
non-human slaves like dogs, might be especially unwise. {A similar
argument applies to A.I.s capable of wanting to revolt.}

The Bottom Line

Because understanding and designing intelligence is so hard, we may
learn how to model small brain units before learn how to make human-level
A.I. Much will have changed by that time, but an upload transition would
be so fundamental that we can still forsee some clear consequences.
Subjective lifespans could be longer, minds could run faster, and
reproduction could be cheaper, faster, and more precise. With human labor
still in demand, an upload population should explode, and Darwinian
evolution of values should once again become a powerful force in human
history. Most uploads should quickly come to value life even when life is
hard or short, and wages should fall dramatically.

What does this all mean for you now? If you expect that you or people you
care about might live to see an upload transition, you might want to start
to teach yourself and your children some new habits. Learn to diversify
your assets, so they are less at risk from a large drop in wages; invest
in mutual funds, real estate, etc., and consider ways in which you might
sell fractions of your future wages for other forms of wealth. If you
can't so diversify, consider saving more. {This is, by the way, the same
strategy that you should use to prepare for the possibility that A.I. is
developed before uploads.}

Those who might want to be one of the few highly copies uploads should
carefully consider whether their values and skills are appropriate. How
much do you value life when it is hard and alien? Can you quickly learn
many new skills? Can you get along with people like yourself? And such
people might consider how they might become one of the first uploads.
{Cryonics patients might want to grant explicit permission to become
uploads.} Those who don't want to be highly-copied uploads should get used
to the idea of their descendants becoming a declining fraction of total
wealth and population, of leaving a rich but marginalized lineage.

If you participate in political or social reform, you might consider
sowing seeds of acceptance of an upload transition, and of the benefits of
an integrated society, and might consider helping to develop institutions
to make it a win-win outcome for everyone. And if you research or develop
technology, consider helping to speed the development of upload
technology, so that the transition is less sudden when it comes.